Banish Often, Invoke Often

'Banish often, invoke often,' that is one of the major magic(k)al principles of the modern world of sorcery. It may seem uncouth after Uncle Al kindly wrote a guest post here, but I'm afraid my main purpose in this post is to document my great discomfort with the maxim he coined.
For a start, I note that people talking about this practice tend to talk about it as part of a daily magical practice. My own opinion is that id I'm even going to aim for a daily magical pratice I might as well turn Christian and have done with it. You will not that I am talking about myself here only. It may be your will or useful for you to have a dsciplined daily practice which you stick to, but it's not for me: my own will is that my practice is much more freeform and based around the daily experiences of my life. My opinion is that the universe itself will place both the opportunities, needs, and resources to deal with them, in my way when I and the universe are ready.
Don't get me wrong, every day I have my little chat with the Goddess. It will come as no surprise that this is rather opposite from any other approach to praying. It amuses me no end to invoke (I knew I would end up talking about these twin practices the wrong way round) her to cause erectile dysfunction to any rapists around. It gives me no end of joy to invoke her power of death on those who hate the faggots. Even the fact that I can say this means that I have broken free from the societal and familial norms of my past and have entered the liberty and ecstasy of the children of the Goddess. This little chat with the Goddess is therefore as much about me as it is about her.
Of course I am talking about a different sort of invoking from Crowley, or may be I am not. I believe him to have meant the magician to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel (now there's a whole library of books in those three words there) often. I am invoking a divinity, however by that invocation my reality is changed and I come into my own. As we know the ultimate target of magic is virtually always the magician himself, and if the magiician by his invocation comes into his own, well maybe he actually is gaining the knowledge and conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel.
That's the trouble with the magic you will read about here: I havre skimmed the chapter headings so know the jargon, but rarely understand the detail, and certain don't follow the practice. I'm far more likely to throw the book away in boredom and just do my own thing. Come to think of it, this blog is mainly a documentation of my doing exactly that and I would frankly advise any reader to throw away the book and so their own magic.
My problem comes far more with the action of banishing. I will admit to having had at least a go at the conventional banishing rituals. You can find them on t'internet, and if you find yourself awed by the recounting of these rituals, it's possible Uncle Al is playing a joke on you, or else just that the writer you've found online is merely intent on telling you how good he is a magician. So good, in fact, that nobody else can even understand it.
In fact, my own opinion is that banishing as a ritual is of questionable use to the witch. I say to the witch, because what I mean is the use of these rituals to a magician of my sort. My own opinion as a hedgewitch, is that since we aim to find the magic in the hedge we suffer far more by banishing than we can ever hope to gain. If you want to stick to the trad magical system as whole you're going to have to go there, but I feel for the hedgewitch it clears way too much stuff away. I have actually read of people who banish very regularly finding that the rite tends to clear *everything* away, and they can end up with a sense of nothingness and emptiness if they are not empty.
My own experience is that I know when I need to banish, because I start carrying around too much psychic gunk. There are numerous very traditional ways of getting rid of this - having a bath is a traditional one for example. I only really banish when I find I'm carrying too much stuff, and try to avoid getting to that point by a magical act which didn't really have a name until I thought about this post and decided to call this act 'putting things where they should be'. It's rather in a the nature of an examination of self and what is going on energetically around one, and deciding where any 'stuff' belongs. I actually do this quite a lot of the time anyway, by sending any nasties either to a recipient who needs the accompanying lesson, or just back where they have come from. Like this I am literally putting any nasties where they should be, I am lightened myself and I am using the stuff that comes my way as part of the witch's work to give people the opportunity to rectify their lives. Yes, someone whom I've divined is a turd may get a spectacularly bad run of luck, but the nature of my magic is that this will very obviously be set up in a way that clearly points them to examine aspects of their lives.
I'm just hoping that if I ever see a psychiatrist I can either keep this to myself or phrase it as a 'dynamic'.
The act of sending back or rearranging dodgy energies was one that it took me ages to come upon but it revolutionised my life in so many ways. I don't have to carry other people's stuff around, and it is the perfect way for a lazy witch to do the daily work I have to do. No doubt this post will have the fluffies throwing up their hands in horror, but this blog is about real witchcraft which comes from blood and bone, and this post is from the heart.